I suppose I'm interested in sorrow, which is very different from depression or despair. Sorrow is continuous with the world; it allows for creativity.

When I look at my old pictures, all I can see is what I used to be but am no longer. I think: What I can see is what I am not.

Home is where somebody notices when you are no longer there.

The perfect borscht is what life should be but never is.

Belief and delusion are incestuous siblings.

I am itching to criticize some well-regarded writers' works, but I am not doing it because I am perfectly aware that my critique could easily be reduced to envy or just plain meanness.

I gradually became aware that my interiority was inseparable from my exteriority, that the geography of my city was the geography of my soul.

I much preferred winning to thinking and I didn't like losing at all.

You don't want your neurosurgeon to have doubts about the meaning of it all while he or she is operating on your brain.

If you can't go home, there is nowhere to go, and nowhere is the biggest place in the world-indeed, nowhere is the world.

We knew - but didn't want to know - what was going to happen, the sky descending upon our heads like the shadow of a falling piano in a cartoon.

The mind of a soul is beyond another’s imagination.

For many people around the world ethnicity is not a language, it is a religion.

where there is never sunshine darkness isn't a scary thing

His love is good I can not compare it to anything

Newton's Fourth Law: Every action has an equal and opposite satisfaction.

... And the only way to find that honesty is to not overthink it. For your writing to come alive--to be multi-dimensional--you must barter away some control.

Sometimes ideas just come to me. Other times I have to sweat and almost bleed to make ideas come. It's a mysterious process, but I hope I never find out exactly how it works.

If you want to imagine the future, imagine a boy and his dog and his friends. And a summer that never ends.

Genes are very important at the individual level but these differences tend to cancel at the national level.

You're in the arms of the Angels; may you find some comfort here.